Читать книгу Jumbo to Jockey: Fasting to the Finishing Post - Dominic Prince - Страница 8

Chapter Three

Six weeks into the new regime, Ralph, who had been best man at Rose’s and my wedding, came to visit with some much needed encouragement. His weight, too, is prone to ballooning since he has an appetite for food, wine and cigars to match my own. However, without telling me, in the past two months he had given up carbohydrates, cut down on wine and managed to lose two stone. He is about to reach forty and I guess he, too, is feeling that mortality is catching up on him.

We had a takeaway curry from Exotika, but no bread or popadoms. I had a green chicken masala curry, Ralph a jalfrezi and we consumed a handful of onion bhajis between us, all washed down with plenty of wine, which I justified by saying that I had not drunk all week. At the end of dinner I took a few puffs on Ralph’s cigar but didn’t like it. During dinner he was positively effusive in his praise of the progress I had made, although I pointed out that I hadn’t gone anywhere near a horse yet. It was encouraging to hear, though, that I was changing shape. Of course, like other friends, Ralph thought the project a little dotty. Years before, I used to ride with Ralph at his mother’s estate in Italy, to where I had exported from England a band of very well-bred Connemara ponies in order to establish a stud. Ralph was useless on a horse, but utterly fearless even though he had great goofy teeth and very bad sight. One day we were hacking in the hot sun through olive groves when a piece of gravel shot up from the rear hoof of the pony I was riding straight into his eye; it got under his contact lens and he screamed and shrieked like a wounded animal. His eye streaming, he begged me to stop, so we did. He abandoned his pony, Cuckoo, right there and then.

The day after our dinner, I was racked with guilt at having strayed from my monastic diet, and determined to redouble my efforts. I cycled twice round the park and made a real effort to puff myself out. I stood up on the pedals, Billy running furiously beside me, trying to keep up as I stretched my legs and felt muscles that I forgot I even had working away under the flab. I did an extra lap of the park as Billy tried to drag me home, and could feel the muscles in my legs aching when I got down off the bike. Even three weeks before I would not have been able to do that. Back home, I gobbled a small portion of linseed and barley for breakfast and a plate of lentils for lunch, cooked in chicken stock until they were firm and crunchy.

As well as upping the mileage around the park, swimming at Chelsea baths was now becoming a daily event. It is an old municipal-style pool with a spectators’ balcony running down one side. The pool is set out in lanes so only those serious about exercising go there, and there are no diving boards or water slides, so there are no children to get in the way. I plunge into the medium lane, the water is lukewarm and I set about my target of twenty lengths.

For the first five lengths I go flat out, stretching my arms and kicking my feet, taking deep breaths to expand my lungs and undo the damage that the smoking has done. Pushing against the water as hard as I can, exhaustion sets in and I slow the pace for the next five lengths, then I try full exertion for two lengths before slowing down again. I know if I were doing the exercise on dry land I’d be soaked in sweat, and with a lean lunch in my belly it is not long before I can feel the fat burning off me. The water keeps my temperature down and I can feel my heart pumping through the ripples. Back on the bike for the cycle home, my legs ache and I struggle to ride in a straight line. The discipline is marvellous, and six weeks in a proper routine has developed, all of which makes me wonder why I hadn’t started doing this twenty years earlier.

While Rose has helped me put the diet together she still brings home mouth-watering food to feed the children. To start with I was able to sit at the table with them as they ate, strong-willed enough not to be tempted to pick at their leftovers, or to find an excuse for just one small mouthful of succulent beef. By the end of February I had lost around seven pounds (or fourteen packets of butter, as I preferred to view it) and could feel that my clothes had loosened around my girth. But I knew myself too well, and could feel the temptation threatening to get the better of me. So I found ways to distract myself while the children were having dinner. I would find an excuse to be on the phone, take the dog for a walk – anything that would keep me out of the way of Mr Robinson’s sausages. In the past, as plates of delicious food were put down in front of the children I might occasionally take a mouthful of sausage from their plates, or a slice of tender chicken. Not now, though. When they ask me to come and sit with them I might finish their greens, which I know are good for me and they can’t stand.

I weigh myself every day, and eventually the needle starts to creep back anticlockwise from 15 stone 10, where it had been stubbornly fixed in the first few weeks. As I stand, I practise pushing my knees together as I have been taught to do in preparation for riding. The trousers aren’t pinching as much as they did even a week ago and I already feel much better, with all the exercise and the fresh air that is now filling my lungs. The time has come to sit on a horse and start riding for the first time in twenty years.

I last got on a horse when I was twenty-eight, on a trip to Ireland. Next to me on the plane was my most recent (and very tricky) girlfriend and ahead of us was a new adventure and with it the hope that this would be the beginning of something special. I had been sent, in the middle of a bitter winter, by the Evening Standard to write a piece about property in Ireland, a country that was in the depths of recession and twenty years into the Troubles that began in 1969. I had little interest in the piece but knew that it was an opportunity to indulge my passion for horses, and my fixation with the girl sitting beside me.

At Dublin airport we hired a car and drove to Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. I had a week to write the piece, and I decided it could wait. I had been offered a day’s foxhunting by a former Master of the Westmeath Foxhounds, and I could not possibly refuse. Hunting in Ireland was something I had never done before, but had always wanted to. My girlfriend, a lissom blonde, was at heart a girl from the shires, horsy to the tips of her upper-class toes. How she would admire me, I imagined, as I took those vast Irish walls at full gallop in pursuit of a fox. How brave. How handsome … I could not wait to show off.

Hunting in Ireland was something that all horse types aspired to. Its stone walls, open ditches and the fast galloping pace was a very different affair to the more sedate hunting fields of England, and offered everything that I loved about being on a horse. The day before the hunt, with my tutor, a grand horseman called Frankie Kiernan, we rode out to get acquainted with the countryside and to shake off the staleness of the working week.

My horse, a beast of an iron-grey gelding named Zachariah, was, at just four years old, much younger than the horses I had been used to, but his behaviour belied his youthfulness. A Thoroughbred crossed with an Irish draught (a carthorse to you and me) standing around sixteen hands high, he was perfectly bred for the job. His predominant gene being Irish draught meant that he was calm and unflustered but at the same time he moved forward nicely and seemed unperturbed by the jumping experience, traits unusual in a horse so young. He had also just been sold to my friend’s brother-in-law in England and he was due to be shipped over to Wiltshire within a matter of days. While he was inexperienced, a few words from Frankie reassured me. ‘If you try and hold that fella up like you’re doing you’ll get into terrible trouble.’ But I had an audience to impress and I thought I knew everything there was to know about horses, so I was trying to get the horse to bounce in front of the open ditches we were practising over, and then leap like a stag over them. Frankie pulled me up immediately. ‘The only way to ride open ditches is at a fast gallop,’ he said. ‘Just lean over him and let him go’. I tried it Frankie’s way and it worked a treat. Zachariah galloped and galloped and we flew round fields, over low stone walls and wide drainage ditches. London, the Standard, the job I was meant to be here doing seemed a million miles away. It was everything I hoped an Irish hunting adventure would be. My girlfriend was deeply impressed too, cooing over me for the rest of the day, so proud to be on my arm.

That night we drank and ate like kings. At that time there was none of the virgin olive oil or lattes of modern Ireland. We filled our bellies with home-made soda bread, Irish whiskey and rubbery Gubbeen cheese. Fish was in abundance and the meat was good, too. I had a few Irish whiskeys then steak, potatoes and, of course, bottles of wine. Before I went to bed I laid out my hunting clothes – breeches, a tweed jacket, hat and long black leather boots, which I waxed and polished until they shone. In the morning I washed, drank a cup of thick brown Barry’s tea and swallowed a mouthful of soft soda bread spread with salty butter. While I waited for the rest of the house to get ready, I paced up and down, hoping that the day would live up to expectations.

I rode down to the meet, and among the thirty of us gathered there was a hunting priest on a piebald cob. Schoolchildren, who should have been in class, were mounted on hairy ponies. Farmers on Thoroughbreds arrived with their wives on Irish draught horses, and rubbed shoulders with the sons and daughters of wealthy parents on flashy animals, all wanting to get on with the day. This was a ragbag of individuals, all gathered with one aim in mind – to chase a fox. I wasn’t nervous, just rather delighted that I was combining a passion for the horse and work at the same time. This was the beating heart of rural Ireland at its most glorious.

The Ireland of thirty years ago was a country where, if a wall fell, it was up to riders to close the gap using barbed wire, and where nature was allowed to overflow unchecked. Anyone out riding had to pick their way through acres of unkempt land, keeping a careful eye on where they were going. I trotted off with Zachariah as though we were old friends. He stopped and started and galloped at my instruction, like a gentleman waiting for me to tell him what to do next. We went through gateways and cantered up hills. He broke into a sweat but never appeared anxious. He was going to look after me was Zachariah.

As the morning went on and I became more confident I tried hurdling larger and larger obstacles. Jumping off a bank down into a riverbed, Zachariah stumbled but collected himself quickly and went on cantering through the water and scrambling up the other side. He was as taken by the occasion as I was, but although he was just as excited as me he wasn’t pulling, and would always wait for me to guide him before starting his gallop.

I had noticed that some of the other riders were jumping barbed wire fences, which I had avoided to begin with, having never jumped them before, but as the day progressed so my courage grew. A barbed wire fence is probably the most difficult thing a horse will be asked to jump. It is vertically upright, difficult for the equine eye to discern and, if you become entangled in it, it cuts you like cheese wire. As I sat watching the others jump over the wire, I thought they were mad, but earlier someone had hung hessian grain sacks and plastic fertilizer ones over the barbs so that the hunters wouldn’t cut themselves if they dropped a leg low when jumping, and they didn’t seem to be having any problems.

By lunchtime we had tracked a fox, the hounds were in full cry and were in full flight across the open fields. As we galloped to the top of a wide-open hill, we were confronted by a large wall. Horses were stopping and refusing to jump. Some approached, then, losing their nerve, ran out to the side. The wall was around five feet high, the same height as others we had cleared easily all day. Emboldened by how well the morning had gone so far, and egged on by some of the field, I said I’d put Zachariah over and the others could follow. The only shame was that the girl I’d come out to Ireland with was nowhere to be seen; she was going to miss my finest equine moment.

A mother and her daughter were queuing up behind me. They knew Zachariah and assured me he’d ‘pop over’ the wall with no problem. I agreed wholeheartedly. We turned a circle, broke into a canter and went steadily towards the wall. Any rider will tell you that you only ever realize how big a wall is when you’re bearing down on it, the full scale of it only becoming apparent in the split second after you have left the ground. Just as we were about to take off, I realized that it was much bigger than I had anticipated, but I need not have worried as Zachariah leapt beautifully. In that moment I became calm again, thinking that, while I was not in complete control, at least Zachariah was. I loosened the reins slightly and I gave myself over to him.

On top of the wall, unseen, lay several strands of barbed wire. Underneath me and out of my sight, Zachariah’s front hoofs clipped the coping stones on top of the wall and he scooped up the clawed wire with his forelegs. The pain must have been unimaginable, and he was still rising, gathering momentum as the spikes started to take hold of his forelegs, tightening with every centimetre further that he travelled. I looked to the right to witness fencing posts pinging out of the ground before they broke and splintered around me. Then it was happening on my left as well. As we landed, a dollop of metallic-tasting blood hit me in the mouth. I was in big trouble. Zachariah and I were the stone in a lethal barbed wire catapult. The mother behind me shouted at her daughter not to watch. ‘Look away,’ she cried, as I was battling to steady Zachariah, as the wire tightened and the ground in front of me turned red. He started bucking, trying to free himself of the wire that was cutting deeper and deeper into his flesh, as it took hold around his neck

Zachariah bobbed one way and twisted another and then the wire wrapped itself round my left knee. As he bucked ferociously beneath me, I was trying to get off to calm him down and all I could think of was that this poor young horse was going to die under me. But not before he had torn off with my leg wrapped in the wire, losing a limb as half a ton of horse hared off, dragging me behind him by the leg. I looked around, shouting out for someone to help us, but there was no one there, the mother and daughter having disappeared from sight on the other side of the wall.

Like a bronco in a rodeo, Zachariah took one last corkscrew of a turn. He bucked so high that the wire ran down his neck and ripped a two-inch hole in the toe of my boot, slicing straight through the leather, but miraculously missing my toes. There was blood everywhere, pumping out of Zachariah’s neck, covering the ground and mixing with the sweat on my face. This was not how it was supposed to end. I was twenty-eight and about to die, and taking a borrowed horse with me. I’d done nothing with my life. I didn’t want it to end like this.

In a final leap, Zachariah flung me from the saddle and galloped off down the hill, blood pouring from his neck with yards and yards of barbed wire and fencing posts chasing after him. I was shaking, near-hysterical. A man galloped off in hot pursuit of the still bleeding Zachariah. The mother and daughter gathered round to comfort me, and ask if I was OK. I just shook, unable to move. All the joy of the morning had evaporated in an instant, rich pleasure turned suddenly to horror.

Zachariah was eventually caught. I ran down the hill after him, stripping off my thick tweed jacket as I went. He was standing, shaking, sweating and frightened. I tied the jacket round his neck like a tourniquet, pulling it tight to stem the bleeding. We were only half a mile from home and someone called a vet from a nearby farmhouse and asked him to get to the house to tend an injured horse. We couldn’t decide whether to wait for a car and trailer or just run back. Zachariah was in shock and I decided to lead him, trotting back to the stables, thinking all the time he was going to die on me, right there in that lush country lane. The blood was still seeping from his neck but I took solace in the wise words a vet once uttered to me: ‘If a horse severs an artery he’s usually dead within forty-five seconds.’

Zachariah was still with me. I pounded down the lanes, egging him on to keep up, all the time thinking he would collapse. The vet was waiting, with a drip to pump an iron solution into Zachariah and slowly he began the delicate process of patching him up. There was nothing more I could do. I went into the house, poured a large whiskey, smoked a cigarette and I never got on another horse again. Zachariah survived.

My girlfriend left me not long afterwards, and for the next twenty years I couldn’t bring myself to get back in the saddle. And this was the problem. I had not ridden a horse since then, and, to be frank, was still terrified that the memories of Ireland would come rushing back at me the moment I got back on a horse. To do this properly and not get spooked I was going to need a plodder, a horse that could get my confidence back. But where would I find a horse that would look after me, and who would be mad enough to lend me one?